Tempest's Window
by Antje
Summary: Small, beautiful and mighty, the daughter of the Boy Who Lived finds a way to suffer the choices of destiny. Drarry.
1. Childhood

Tempest's Window  
Characters: Harry/Draco, their daughter, who clearly has to be an OC, minor HP characters, and other minor OC's  
Rating: Teen  
Warnings: mpreg, adult stuff  
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all related characters are proudly owned and operated by the Compound of JK Rowling.  
Length: 15,450 words; 5 parts

*

1. Childhood

They'd known for months she was coming. She was going to be theirs, for always, for the rest of their life. And it was as though they'd known her before she arrived.

It was the way she chose to come that told her nuances, her secret little aphorisms; one father's stubbornness, the other father's pride. She promised to be sugar, spice, everything in the universe that could be nice; but she had a special ingredient she hadn't yet whispered.

She was going to be a Potter. Draco had said so, one quiet Sunday afternoon. 'She's going to be a Potter. I can tell. She's not a Malfoy; we're much to lazy to kick like this.'

She was a Potter now, but no name before it. For all the ways they knew her, she kept them waiting for her name.

Harry looked up from work when Draco wobbled unsteadily into the sitting room. The quill lifted from _index rerum_, his tired eyes from tight lines of annotations. An hour's long adumbration of thunder and lightning wound up its August charm, with specks of rain hitting the pane.

Draco leaned against the doorway, exhausted smile on his face.

'What, now? In the middle of a blasted tornado?' Harry craned off his spectacles as he dashed to Draco, the placidity in his features almost too eerie.

'You should've expected that,' murmured Draco. 'She is our daughter.'

*

The aroma of her 'all things nice' element became evident as she first inhaled the air of St Mungo's, as she took her first bite at the doctor; and, when denied the act, she took her first scream.

The room's window shattered. Glass trickled to the floor, to the street below. The downpour was suddenly inside, with flashes of cold white, with rich pounds in a blackened sky.

A quick witch seamed the glass. And the doctor chuckled.

'Quite a little tempest we're having.'

Draco and Harry shared a regard of meaningful, silent acumen. She was still in her fathers' arms, but the storm razed and enraptured.

'Tempest,' Draco declared.

Enswathed in pink, she appeared as candy floss and peony blossoms, not as hurricane winds and flooding rains. But she was born in August, a night whose infamous weather was the talk of the country for years to come, and remembered in the ramblings of old men in small villages; and in the wizarding community of Britain, it would be remembered and glorified as the night Tempest Potter was born.

*

Four years passed. Tranquillity bloomed from a sense of accomplishment, an allusion of completeness. The everyday schedules, the working, the aging, were mere fixtures to a house built by two previously adventurous men, pioneering men who now were old enough to smile into the future of continuous hope and love, and old enough to smile at the memory of destiny.

The dear, quaint, bygone shape of destiny. She had been vanquished from their lives at their first kiss. Always applauded, thanked, accepted—but vanquished.

Yet they were wrong in supposing her spirit wouldn't find them again. Draco had the realisation of her presence on a normal autumn Saturday.

'We're going for a walk,' Draco said to Harry. 'Want to go?'

Harry flipped the page of a book on pretence, as the welcome interruption energised his nerves. He thudded the book closed and left it on the next volume in the stack. 'Absolutely. Where's—'

'Upstairs,' he handed Harry a russet scarf, 'getting Miss Crier.'

'She doesn't go anywhere these days without the fair Miss Crier. I'm not complaining.' He kissed Draco's forehead as his husband's nimble fingers aided a helpless fashion sense. 'Thank Merlin she plays with a doll and not—'

Harry stopped when he heard a thud. A single thud. Alarmed, Draco ran ahead, Harry behind, and both rammed into each other in the foyer. At the bottom of the staircase sat Tempest. It wasn't until she saw her parents that she began a hearty wail.

'What happened?' Harry tried to coax it from her. But she cried and clung to him. Draco knelt and searched her for injuries. 'Is she all right?'

'Looks to be. But I don't understand— Tempest, did you fall down the stairs?'

Tempest wiped her reddened teal eyes and shook her liquorice head. The two men were thrown into further confusion.

'It's not like I wanted her to fall down the stairs,' Draco imparted. 'But an explanation would be nice.'

'Maybe she bounces.'

'Harry.'

'What! It happens. Look at Neville's kids, they bounce all over the place. Like a bunch of rabbits they are.'

Draco snickered in spite of himself. It _was_ sorely true that the Longbottoms had a sprightly, spring-inspired brood. 'Tempest hasn't spent enough time around them to have picked it up. And I'm guessing that's more hereditary than something she just happened to learn.'

'What do we do?'

'Well, I don't think there's a thing we can do now. Let's have our walk. Maybe she'll tell us in her own time.' Draco said it and hoped it would be true, but Tempest wasn't much for talking. While intelligent, clever, not exactly shy, she would rather hear than speak.

_Hear no evil, speak no evil_, Draco often thought.

Unfortunately, destiny thrived on evil.

*

The next winter, Tempest fell ill.

Harry was up in the wee hours, figuring Ministry work out of the office, and keeping track of his personal records. In mid-sentence, the light began to flicker. He eyed the lamp as though he was the one who'd gone insane. He knew he was older, of course, but not so old that his eyesight would play such mean tricks. He let the quill plop to the parchment, the flame in the lamp bobbing once more, to wick, straighten, then extinguish to a purl of smoke. He looked behind him, and all the lights had gone out. Only moon- and starlight streamed through the windows.

Wand ready, he followed instincts up the stairs. As soon as he widened the door open to Tempest's room, he caught a scent that rose the hairs on the back of his neck. A mephitic odour, the smell of chills and sweat and a whimpering child.

Twenty minutes later, neither of them knew what to do. Between them, they had years of healing study, they had never stopped training for a third war, and none of their skills released Tempest from misery.

The lamp was relit, and Draco's eyes were misty, and Harry's eyes were dazed, and both were disbelieving.

'Hospital,' Harry announced. 'Better to be seen as overly concerned than to be buying a pine box.'

Draco nodded. He held his hand cupped to her small forehead. His palm began to burn.

*

Snow piled on the window's ledge. Harry and Draco watched it grow over the three hours they waited at St Mungo's. The storm matured to a frenzy of white whirls and cacophonous thunder that rumbled the building. But the air was warming, and rain soon fell in place of snow, and a pale, blonde, svelte figure aggressed upon them.

Harry shook his shoulder and roused Draco. He hadn't been asleep but was exhausted, eyes burning, mind analogous to the slush outdoors. But at the sight of Healer Lovegood, he stood at attention, gripping Harry's hand.

'She's all right,' Luna announced plainly.

'So we shouldn't have brought her,' Draco stated.

'Quite the contrary. We are relieved you did. Her fever was startlingly high. And something remarkable happened.' Luna's whimsical gaze of school years returned, as if she was amused. 'She's a very interesting little girl, isn't she? You two didn't tell me she could fly.'

Harry didn't know which of them was more surprised: Draco, Luna, or him.

*

'I don't believe it,' Draco mumbled. Dawn crept across the landscape, sending his silver head into an otherworldly glow. He stuck his palms against his eyes, willing the headache and confusion from him. 'It's got to be a joke.'

'Luna's odd,' Harry said, 'but she doesn't lie. And she wouldn't lie to us about our daughter's, er, special abilities.'

'All she said she saw was Tempest hovering a little over the bed. Why does that mean she can fly? Maybe she was just practising non-verbal levitation spells.'

'Oh, that's right, darling, rationalise it to death, because I'm sure that will make it go away. She's four years old; she has no concept of non-verbal spells. There are records of wizards in the past who have possessed levitation abilities, otherwise known as _flight_.'

'Yeah?' For a moment Draco found hope. Then it diminished. 'Oh for Merlin's sake, Harry, don't bullshit me now. Name one.'

Harry took on a pensive expression, an erudite look that always smashed Draco's heart to hot splinters. It didn't even matter if Harry made it up, just as long as he said it while looking arrogant and intelligent, with a sexy coal forelock hiding the top of the scar.

'Edwinna Albertson Netherwood. Sixteenth century. Rumour has it she was the first one to fly over the Hebrides. Though no one ever actually saw it. Ergo the word rumour. Some rumours do have a basis in fact, however, and legends are— Never mind. We're not in a classroom, are we?' Harry nodded, taking on the airs of a matter-of-fact prim schoolmarm. 'Edwinna Albertson Netherwood. Sixteenth Century.'

The lies were as fulfilling as the truth. Draco crashed to the bed, accompanied by Harry, and the two stared into the brightening ceiling. The passing minutes were thick with self-criticism, doubt, and wonder.

'What if it's true?' Draco eventually asked.

'If it is, it won't change much. We'll adjust. It'll be all right.'

'Merlin,' he mumbled, face twisted, 'I never thought of having a child more gifted than either of us. I don't know if my healthy conceit can handle it.' He laughed as Harry playfully slugged him, playfully wrestled, then lovingly hugged by arms and legs.

*

Draco had his hands in fists, and his face had reddened. Harry patted him on the chest, out of the way, to the innocent-looking creature on the sofa, sitting on her hands. Eight, nearly nine, and already had she mastered the appropriate foundations for getting in and out of trouble. Heaven-sent purity to her doll-like features, but the ambages of her soul remained out of sight, formless, unknown.

Yet becoming clearer with the falling away of years.

Harry took over. He was not the disciplinarian, that was Draco. Harry had always been the affectionate ear, the hand of supportive, gentle guidance.

'You heard what your father said.' Harry huffed when she wouldn't look at him. 'You're not to go up there again. What if someone had seen you floating through the air?'

She rolled her eyes to him, lids narrowed, rimmed in black by thick lashes. 'What if someone did? I wouldn't care. They're just Muggles. What do they know?'

'Tempest, if you'll just wait a couple more years, you'll be at Hogwarts, and you'll be able to fly all you like round the grounds. But not here. I know you're frustrated, believe me I know what it's like to be in your situation. When I was a kid I used to commit magic without knowing it, and I grew up with your Uncle Dudley. Imagine growing up like that, not knowing the world really _has_ a place for people like us.'

'Oh Merlin,' she cursed, 'this one of those "back-in-my-day" talks that makes me bored.' Tempest stood up, edging to leaving the room. But she looked back at her parents, a pitying cock to her shapely little head of long obsidian coils. 'It _isn't_ the same, you know. You two didn't fly. And I wager there's a whole _mess_ of things I can do that you can't. I'm going to my room.'

Harry's fingers hid his eyes. Draco slipped an arm at his waist.

'That went well,' he said, sighing. 'She's getting out of control, Harry.'

'I know.'

'And I'm scared to death.'

'So am I.'

'What happens now?'

Harry gripped his hand. The fingers were cold with fear. 'Love her, have faith in her. She might grow out of it, like you did.'

'I was never like that.' Draco headed away. 'That's what scares me.'

*

Harry found something more to do for her. She was to start at Hogwarts a year early, unprecedented, but it helped to be on good terms with the majority of staff. He had used it to his advantage, to the advantage of his gifted, discouraged child.

Draco and he were there, standing beside her, in Ollivander's of Diagon Alley, the moment she held her first wand. The new Ollivander, already in his fifties, took nearly forty minutes to decide which wand suited her. He never pulled out any but what he thought was immediately correct.

'Got to find the right one to start,' Ollivander said, shuffling about the narrow aisles and reams of narrow boxes. 'Afraid that if I put the wrong one in her hands, London won't survive.'

Draco laughed, because it seemed the sort of thing a wand maker would say in front of any child's parents. But Harry's brow furrowed, and he looked from Ollivander to Tempest. She was curiously examining the space about her, the wonders of a new world, radiant skin flawless like Draco's, luminous black hair like Harry's, and a charisma that neither of them had ever claimed. She possessed herself well for a child of ten, with control, dignity, unsurpassed in her age group. Strangers thought her twelve, thirteen years of age, though small for her height, and slight, she had a wisdom forever on display. More than one friend, relative, or stranger had used the phrase, 'She's an old soul.'

Even Ollivander had said it. He finally brought round a box. He set it on the work surface, still lidded, and edged it forward. 'Think you'd better take it out of the box, Miss Potter.'

The lid was caked in years of dust. But Tempest did as she was told, for this instant she was disinclined to be fractious. She wrestled off the lid, calm, and rolled back the tissue paper, still calm, and lifted from it a wand of eleven and three-quarters inches, darkly stained, the necrosis of black cherries.

A silence so eerie suffocated all aspects of noise, the din from the Alley gone, their own breathing gone. Then a wind came from nowhere, swirled loose papers into the sky, cobwebs fluttering in high, neglected corners. The cyclone formed a plume overhead, more and more opaque, till it was a storm cloud and rain pattered their heads.

Instinctively, Tempest gave the wand a flourishing twirl. The storm cloud disappeared, a rainbow in its place. The colours of the spectrum glowed in every inch of the building, and its arc soared out the front window. Coos and ahs were heard from Alley shoppers.

Harry had tears in his eyes, and his hand desperately pinched Draco's. Breath against his throat burned as he whispered, 'My God.'

Tempest pulled the wand to her, the rainbow aglow behind and above. She gave a tip of her head to Ollivander. 'Thank you.'

He nodded dumbly in return. 'Right, my pleasure. European beech, said to be the trees of the elves—if you believe in that, Miss Potter. A good length for you, something you can grow into, eleven and three-quarters inches. Nice wand, should last you an eon, my dear.' He gave her the empty box hesitantly, as if he feared being too near her.

'What's its core?' Draco asked as he settled the bill.

Ollivander gave him sickles for change, a slight shake of his head. 'It doesn't got no core, sir. She doesn't need one. Core's inside her, it is. Well, have a nice day, gentlemen. And you, Miss Potter, good luck at school, not that you need it.'


	2. Hogwarts

2. Hogwarts

On a hot September night, post came. Draco dived for the letter, scaring their family owl to moult, but he'd stayed awake far past his bedtime for just that very reason. Harry joined him, the two reading Tempest's slanted cursive with baited breath.

Both roared with laughter, joyous and proud.

'Pay up, husband!' Harry had his hand out. 'I think that clearly means I won the bet.'

Draco reread the letter. 'Surely she means Slytherin. How can she _not_ be in Slytherin House? I think the Sorting Hat's getting a bit confused in his old age. She _has_ to be Slytherin!'

Harry pointed to the House name, printed in capital letters and underlined three times. 'Ravenclaw, it says so, right there. I won! Ha! You owe me fifty galleons, thank you! I said Ravenclaw, you said Slytherin, that makes me right, you wrong!'

Draco frowned, perturbed. 'I haven't got the fifty galleons. And how is it you were so sure? You never thought, not for a second, that she would be Gryffindor?'

'No,' Harry said, suddenly no longer humoured, suddenly muted in emotion, 'no, never. It's not her destiny to follow us, you see. She is her own person. She only just looks like us on the outside, but inside she's Tempest Potter.'

*

Tempest lived up to the variables of her name. She was a storm of swarming interest among fellow students. She was sandpaper that roiled and chaffed the faculty.

'You're allowing her too much freedom,' Professor Weasley voiced, her eyes narrowed to little slits on Professor Longbottom. 'You're spoiling her. She needs to be controlled or she'll—'

'She needs to follow a path only _she_ has chosen,' Neville insisted. He walked swiftly down the corridors, the Defence Against the Dark Arts instructor nipping at his heels like a hungry pup wanting a bone. 'We cannot make decisions that are not ours. We have no authority but that which Harry and Draco provided. We keep an eye on her. That's what we promised. Anything beyond that would be crossing boundaries.'

'Boundaries!' Ginny repeated, as though Neville had hexed her. A trio of students ogled as they dripped by. Ginny waved a hand, billowing her robes. 'Keep moving, girls, honestly! This conversation doesn't concern you.'

But they lingered, and Ginny's heart sank. The girls were Third Year, thirteen or so, one a willowy blonde from Ravenclaw.

'Please, Professor,' the Ravenclaw said, 'it's Tempest Potter. She's done it again. You'd better come and see.'

The professors sprinted to the Great Hall. It was mostly deserted, with a handful of lingering lunch students, but none was eating. A queue had formed below the two walls of windows, north and south, and faces of amazement gazed up at the stained glass. Ginny and Neville examined the moving images, knights and dragons and maidens fair; fire, earth, water, and air so real the room smelled of it. Other professors had finally arrived to usher the Great Hall vacant in their bewildered sense of authority. The doors moaned against hinges, and they began stories to the headmistresses.

She raised a hand, wrinkled face imparting amenity among them. 'I am not in the business of listening to excuses and explanations without absolute proof.' Professor McGonagall surveyed the moving artwork of the windows, and her eyes shone in awe and disbelief. But when her gaze broke she found seven professors, not a single one of them sure how Tempest had done it. 'Well, has anyone found her yet?'

They shook their heads, shifting uncomfortably.

'She's _twelve_!' McGonagall spat. 'Twelve-year-old girls do not simply disappear from Hogwarts!'

'Not all twelve-year-old girls have to,' said Neville. 'Only one has to.'

*

Tempest resurfaced hours later. For the sake of gloating, for the sake of praise, so claimed her host of glib enemies. They sneered at her back, at her sleek black tendrils that never seemed out of place. They hated her as do all the young who know jealousy but do not yet comprehend its powers of destruction. Tempest walked the halls with her shoulders straight and chin lofted, superior, her intelligence magnified by the stunt she had once again accomplished. She was known for providing Hogwarts with unusual décor makeovers, from the time she had given the Potions room pink draperies; last spring when the Slytherin banners in the Great Hall had a fluffy-tailed rabbit as a mascot in place of a serpent; to Sir Cadogan's suddenly blue panoply; to last Halloween when she spelled the moving staircases to scream and shriek obnoxiously, ghoulishly, beneath all feet and toes that traversed them. Her best friend in school was no mere girl; she had the respect and admiration of Peeves the Poltergeist, and the adulatory defences of the Grey Lady. But it was suddenly becoming not enough.

'If you continue with this behaviour, Miss Potter, I shall have you expelled,' the headmistress warned. 'I've written to your parents.'

That was no threat. 'Professor Longbottom writes to them all the time. He spies on me to tell them how I've been acting.'

'And don't you feel guilty, don't you feel remorseful?'

Tempest wrinkled her brow, surveying the weight of the question, the weight of her validity. 'No, Professor. I hurt no one.'

'But you have a blatant disregard for rules.'

After a blink, Tempest spoke in her hushed voice, soft enough to make the adults believe she was malleable. 'Professor, no woman ever changed the world by following the rules.'

Tempest's unusual eyes widened as the professor let out a puff of air from a mouth struggling to keep it in. What an oddity! Tempest blinked again, willing to accept this act, for Professor McGonagall was _laughing_. Maybe not the whole embodied action of it, but it was there, subtle in her hazel eyes.

McGonagall extended a crystal dish. 'Have a biscuit, Potter, before you go.'

*

The front door opened and closed, a familiar, comforting sound to Harry. He sat in the dark of the sitting room, finding the twilight glow comforting, too. It softened the world, made the night friendly, companionable, best for meditation and insight. He was pleased Draco didn't ignite the lamps as he entered. He sensed the distraught mood. He sat on the chair's arm. A letter lay closed in Harry's lap, but the insignia was recognised.

'What's she done now?'

'It's not… Nothing.' Forlorn, melancholic, Harry slipped his arms around Draco's waist, tucking his head against his chest. 'It's the opposite. She's done everything.'

Draco sighed, an extra squeeze of sympathy to Harry's neck. 'Everything.'

'She's excelling at a rate beyond the school's capacity. They,' Harry's pleading gaze wound through Draco's soul, 'they want her to take her N.E.W.T.s this summer, at the end of term… when the Seventh Years take them.'

Unable to hold his own weight, Draco sank to the carpet, his back against the chair. Silence reigned for a distended minute, and the chorus of insects hummed outside the window. September had come again, and Tempest had not been away for her Fifth Year more than a week.

'She must've,' Draco was at a loss for words, explanations evaded, evanesced, 'learned a lot over the summer. Without us knowing. Merlin, Harry,' he found the hand at his shoulder and squeezed his agony into it, 'she's only fourteen.'

'They think it's best. Draco, they can't _teach_ her anything. Neville said so as early as May that he couldn't teach her anything. And Ginny has hinted the same, though she wouldn't dare agree with Neville. They've always butted heads about Tempest. They don't have the last word, so it doesn't matter. McGonagall is the one who talked to the Ministry about it. We're supposed to meet at Hogwarts in October for a conference. If the Ministry agrees, once they hear Tempest's case, it will be up to us. But it's ultimately up to her.'

Draco nodded consent, unable to speak, thrashing in the depths of his thoughts. The sense of destiny unfolding came again. He was thankful for the pinion of reality in the unadorned sweetness of Harry's touch. The cavern of an unknown future yawed virulent and troublesome before them.

*

Unlike other fourteen-year-olds, Tempest Potter was unembarrassed to have her parents visit her at Hogwarts. She traipsed beside them, her frame of barley five feet and an inch making her seem far younger than her years, while her blond father towered over her, and her brunette father was of a sturdy, huggable height. Before the conference hour, Tempest sat with them at the Ravenclaw table, constantly filling up her parents' plates with delectable house-elf victuals, and spoke earnestly about their time at Hogwarts.

'I don't suppose the two of you are real keen to be back here,' she said, her mood wistful, led by a wisp of lunar magic. 'You didn't get along well then. And it must have some rather awful memories.'

'A few,' admitted Harry, flashing a crooked smile, 'but many more good ones.'

'Food's exactly as I remember.' Draco's comment was slurred with a bite of bread pudding. 'Maybe better.'

Since Tempest had no close friends, Harry and Draco were subjected to a ream of acquaintances. Everyone knew Tempest. One of her biggest supporters was a slender Ravenclaw Sixth Year, Esias Pugh. He sat with them through the ebbing hours of lunch, charming, sociable, and able to make Tempest smile.

'Conference is today, isn't it?' He formed the enquiry towards his friend. Tempest rounded her shoulders, mouth tightening, and nodded. 'You look nervous.'

'I am,' she confessed, the teal and silver of her odd irises momentarily fixed on nightmares. What she feared she found nearly impossible to express. 'It isn't what you think. I'm not afraid they'll tell me I can't take the N.E.W.T.s I'm afraid they'll tell me I can, and _then_ I'll fail them. After all the expectations—'

Harry shook his head. 'No one has expectations, Tempest.'

Her thin brows tilted. 'But I do, Dad. I've my own expectations. If I can't reach them, oh, I know I'll survive; it won't be the end of the world. But it's the idea of it all… the idea that,' her innate confidence failed her, 'that everyone's always talking about me.'

Esias exchanged bold glances between Mr Malfoy and Mr Potter. He wakened Tempest on the arm with one of those touches of friendship, a variant of a smack, but more affectionate. 'Do you really think your dad hasn't ever been talked about before?'

She had her eyes up, examining each father with equal measure intuition and hope. 'Which one?' she said to Esias.

'Both of them.'

*

The first five minutes of the conference, held in the large, round office of the headmistresses, was full of introductions, names, greetings, and uncertainty. The Ministry had over-extended itself, sending all three representatives from the Wizarding Examinations Authority. Aside from Professor McGonagall were Professor Longbottom, head of Gryffindor House; Professor Cubbage, head of Slytherin House; Professor Onderdonk, head of Hufflepuff House; and Professor Keigwin, head of Ravenclaw House. Harry and Draco were relieved for the presence of Neville and McGonagall, at least their faces and voices were familiar. The rest were strangers. Cubbage and Onderdonk were both older, in their late fifties, and had gone to school at the time of Harry's parents. But Professor Keigwin was a diminutive, petite young woman who couldn't have been three decades old. While bubbly and cheerful, Harry had her pegged as a Hufflepuff, not the usual regal solemnity one saw in a Ravenclaw student. Until she spoke and brought out papers from her briefcase.

'I've taken the liberty of formulating a list of school accolades Tempest has received since her initial year at Hogwarts. If you'll take the time to look it over, I'm sure you'll be spellbound and enraptured by her wit and natural magical ability. However, Professor,' this aside to McGonagall, who looked dumbfounded by this little Ravenclaw woman—girl, really—usurping her rightful leadership position, 'I must voice a slight protest over the number of attendees at this meeting. There are certainly a lot of us! I've had the pleasure of getting to know Tempest over the last two years, since I started teaching, and I know she is displeased by more authoritative eyes watching her than is necessary. I pose a request to you, Professor, that we might dismiss some attendees? I'm aware of the concerns professors Cubbage and Onderdonk may have towards the overall welfare of Hogwarts when a student is considered for early commencement, but I believe this meeting would continue best, and we would hear the most from Tempest herself, if there were far fewer of us in the room.'

The three members of Ministry were dumbstruck by Professor Keigwin's innocent aggression. They would gladly go, they said, as if Keigwin had enchanted them into consent, dissension not even cognisable, if that is what made the young lady more comfortable. Keigwin grinned as they departed, to wait in the anteroom of the office proper. As McGonagall reclaimed her seat, she eyeballed Keigwin with a hint of surprise and restrained respect.

'Well done, Winny,' she said. 'I was wondering how we would free up some space in here. I didn't anticipate entertaining such a large gathering, otherwise I might have provided wine and cheese. You don't mind that they've gone, do you, Alodia?'

The remaining witch from the Ministry shook her velvet blue-black head. 'Not at all, Minerva. It does feel far less claustrophobic in here.' Alodia Wenzel referred to her notes, leaving them on her knees, already a mess of yellow office tablets and the papers Keigwin had provided. 'Now I should like to begin by asking you a few questions, Tempest.'

Advertence anticipated, Tempest had already straightened her shoulders. She was unreadable, imperturbable, but her hands were clasped together, palms moist. An apothegm unclouded from the sharp divisions of her mind, and she ran through it, again and often, to ready herself for the Ministry's inquisition.

_Nothing she says can ever stop me from doing magic._

*

Esias caught Tempest up in the hallway, flying all the way from morning Potions to hear how the conference went yesterday afternoon. 'Tempest.'

'Hello, Esias.' She tossed him a contemptuous glance. 'You shouldn't have run; you'll aggravate your asthma. If you wanted to know so badly how the conference went, perhaps you shouldn't have found a way to avoid me last night.'

'I was at the library.'

'Behind in Potions again, I see.'

'Of course. Cubbage is a right old bat. I don't suppose you could—'

'Oh but that would be cheating, Esias. Why should you want help from a Fifth Year?'

'Because you're the smartest person in the entire world.'

'Flattery will get you nowhere with me.'

She was always aloof, Esias knew that, and he had somehow found a strategy around her common mannerism to push everyone away that wasn't Peeves or the Grey Lady. He genuinely liked her, as a person, as a girl with soft black hair and strange teal eyes. He cared very little that she was Tempest Potter, for the name had become like that of a goddess, whispered, revered, aggrandised to the point where the real Tempest Potter was bleared behind the growing vines of myth.

Honesty replaced his inherent pettifogging. 'All right, how about if you help me because we're friends? If you don't, I'll likely fail Potions, and I won't get the N.E.W.T.s required to intern at the hospital. You know the work I'm doing this year. It's difficult.'

Tempest halted, the enormous canvas sack of books jingling against her slim hip. Arms crossed, she regarded Esias in what she hoped was a condescending fashion. But one had to be tall, she decided, to be even the slightest bit patronising. 'Esias, if you want to be the best healer St Mungo's ever had, you're going to—' She lost her will to argue. She took his elbow, pitying him, and walked with him down the corridor. 'Never mind. I'll help you.'

'Thanks. You won't regret it.' He dared himself to leave a kiss on the top of her head, whose nonsexual intent she accepted. 'You never told me about the conference.'

'It went… favourably.'

'So that means you're leaving this year, right?'

'That's what it means.'

'What did they say? What happened? What are you going to do when you're done with school? You'll still be an underage wizard by law. Is there a way around that? Come on, Tempest, tell me _something_.'

'You'll have to wait and see, Esias.'

'You don't like to talk about yourself, do you?'

'What for? Everyone has his own opinion about me. Do you know what they say Esias?'

He tucked his chin to his chest, downcast, careful not to look up till she had spoken.

'The Dark Lord reborn in the Boy Who Lived,' she laughed as a scoff. 'Ultimate revenge or some such. They say I'm the moon goddess, that I ought to be worshipped. They say I'm going to be the youngest Minister for Magic that ever was. They say I'm a sham, that I'm a scheme, that I lie and make all of it up. They say I cheat, steal, pay, doff, deal out one amercement after another, and that I'm mad.' She sighed and leaned against the castle wall, the diaphanous being who outshone other students queuing for DADA.

Esias held his books close, keen on watching her. An alluring dwarfism possessed her, and he wondered how so much magic came from so tiny a person. 'You're not any of those things. You're Tempest Potter. You're you.'

She hiked up the strap to her bag as students began shuffling in to the classroom. Esias was set for Herbology, and she had only one thing to say before they parted.

'Would you bet your life on that, Esias?'

*

Tempest rubbed her face, the anxiety brutal, the want of something elusive churning her stomach in mismatched directions. 'Can't you make them go away?' She hadn't outgrown the habit of sitting on her hands when nervous.

Draco patted her shoulder, and she looked up at him with wide eyes. Already, his words were miraculously intercepted. She spoke it while looking down and away, into the distance.

'I know I'm the youngest person to ever get all N.E.W.T.s,' and her vibrantly obsidian head trembled, 'but I don't want to talk about it. Why should anyone from the _Daily Prophet_ care whether or not Tempest Potter did this or that? I wish people would just _stop_ throwing my name about. It isn't a vocabulary word, and it isn't descriptive, and it isn't how the weather is, or the state of the Ministry. It's my name. One gets sick of hearing one's own name.'

'You're not the youngest.' Harry had to whisper it at first. His daughter awed, and her manifestation of magic was frightening at times. He understood her pain, as he had heard his name far too often to ever want to hear it again. But he'd triumphed, through the love he had with Draco, through settling into his own quiet life, he had beaten them, and Draco liked to say that Harry had fooled them all. 'Tempest, you're not the youngest student at Hogwarts to receive all N.E.W.T.s. You're the only person to ever receive every N.E.W.T., regardless of age. That's why the _Prophet_ wants to interview you.'

Tempest's sigh was that of simple resignation. 'There's no getting out of it, is there?' She asked the question to Harry.

He knew what she wanted to know. Cold spilled inside him. 'I could lie to you and say it'll get easier. But it doesn't.' He flickered his gaze to Draco, and found the stability he'd come to rely on. 'Fame doesn't lessen, Tempest. I was famous in the wizarding world before I ever knew about it. But that's for something I had no control over. It wasn't through talent or poise or intelligence or beauty, or for any other reason that your name winds through the wizarding world.'

'That's what I don't understand,' said Tempest, attempting not to pout to two fathers who adored her, who would've wished her pain miles away. 'I haven't done anything so fabulous, and I haven't done anything legendary. N.E.W.T.s hardly count.'

'It's all right,' Draco responded kindly. He knelt before her and took her hand, his grip able to withstand her independence. 'Harry and I will be right there with you when the reporter arrives. We're not going to leave this room. Just answer honestly, Tempest, be yourself.'

She slipped her arms about his shoulders and squeezed. 'I don't know how to do anything else. I only ever am myself.'

Harry let his hand drift over the top of her head, her wavy molasses locks warm and slick beneath his palm. He remembered when she was a baby, born hairless, pink, brash and loud during one of England's rare tornadoes. And now she was fourteen, the first of-age wizard of fourteen since the Decree of Underage Wizardry was a mere inception, an anomalous amendment. To think that this little baby Draco and he had created would conquer the world so rambunctiously, would snap rules and regulations in two without a hint of mischievousness or ill intent, that levitated and soared like a butterfly, that shook the house during a nightmare, that this little being would have trouble finding herself amid all her extraordinary talents.

Harry kissed the top of her head, batting away a need to cry. 'I love you.'

'I love you too.' She held their hands in hers. 'Both of you.'

A rap sounded from the foyer. The reporter had arrived. Tempest waved the efforts of her parents aside.

'It's all right,' she told them, straightening the plaid school skirt and white shirt she continued to wear outside Hogwarts. 'It's my responsibility. I'll show them in.'


	3. The Window

3. The Window

The following winter is when she constructed the Window. The infamous Window that some in the wizarding world referred to as the Tempest Hex Window. She never said how long it took her to construct, but Harry devised it must've been months. And why she had built it, the real _how_ and _why_ of it, often evaded his logic. Draco said the most likely reason was the challenge. It was the only magic she'd ever done where research was required.

Tempest brought it to her parents' house, nestled among the knolls and verdure of the Lake Country, on one of her week's off from work. She worked for the Ministry of Magic, as an Unspeakable, and Merlin only knew what she did. But her hours were long. That was how Draco and Harry were able to catch their first glimpses into the world of the Unspeakables.

'They have plenty of Unspeakables,' Tempest related, careful not to divulge too much information all at once. 'Some are Unspeakables that you might see every day, and you would never know what their purpose was if you did not work with them. And we work all day, a stretch of three straight weeks. After the three weeks are over, we get a week's holiday. It is all meticulously planned by Ministry officials; who works when, whose holiday is this week, next week, and so on. It's marvellous, it truly is.'

At winter's end, she had her week's holiday. Night had fallen when she arrived at the house. The door flew open at her command. Draco and Harry heard the approach and dashed into the foyer. They found an enormous frame, just slightly taller than the height of the front door, the width of it not so wide that it wouldn't fit through the door horizontally. Tempest set the object down against a bearing wall. Greetings were exchanged, her coat and accessories removed, before Draco enquired after the parcel.

'Why did you bring us a window?' he asked, hand tapping the ordinary glass in what looked to be an ordinary window.

'It isn't a window,' she declared.

Harry inspected it himself. He ran a hand along the wooden frame, its grain masterfully preserved in a dark cherry veneer. 'It's teeming with magic. I can feel it in my hand.'

Draco quickly put his hand near Harry's, hoping for the same inkling. Only for a moment did he feel a tingle surge into the tips of his fingers. His hand automatically jerked away. 'This is no ordinary window.'

In a matter of twenty minutes, the Window hung on a large wall of the study parlour. A few miscellaneous aquarelles that none had favoured through the years were hastily removed to make way for the especial artefact. Then the three of them stood back, in order of height, with Draco in the back, then Harry, and their little Tempest in the front. They took turns admiring the way it fit with the house, the colouring, the overall décor.

Tempest flipped round, her coreless wand brandished. Her grin was from ear to ear. 'Want to see how it works?'

*

For a long while, the Window's sole agenda was to paint the pastoral Lake Country as it truly was. For a while, the Window was a mere window.

'But it will change,' Tempest warned, 'when the threat of magic rises.'

And why magic should threaten, and why any such threat should rise, neither Harry nor Draco could discern. Tempest, bound by the securities of the Unspeakables, could not warn them with her voice, but she could warn them with intent.

Harry's days were rife with study, writing articles, laying out the foundations for his Great Magic Compendium. His dogged determination often found itself in a subtle battle of wills when it came to the elegance and enticement of the Window. He might spend long minutes staring into it. What secrets did it hold? What was its true nature? But it did not think for itself. He did not fear it. But it intrigued him. He waited for its revelations.

Draco found the mysticism of the object alluring. More often than not, however, he shared little of Harry's attention span. A gaze or two, lingering no longer than ten seconds, to espy the idyllic lay of the land Harry and he both favoured far more than any other place in England. Then he would turn away in hope. Hope that Harry's long stares never found a shadow out of place.

*

One fourth-week, three years after constructing the Window, Tempest failed to come home. No note. No owl. No message of any kind.

After a worrisome night for both parents, in the early morning hours, when the light was still a bleak silver sheen, a light rap sounded on the kitchen door. Harry answered, red-eyed and pale. It took a squint through ever-thickening glasses to arrest the bleary figure, dark of complexion yet gold of eye, into a recognisable shape.

'Esias?' Harry folded back the door, and Esias Pugh entered.

'Hello, Mr Potter, Mr Malfoy.' The thin smile was meant in kindness, though it failed far below its intended target. 'Tempest sends her regards and apologies.'

Draco was far too exhausted and tense to draw himself up from the kitchen chair. To give semblance of composure, he wrapped his hands around a steaming cup of tea he had no interest in drinking. 'Is she all right?'

Esias was quick to nod. It palliated and satisfied. 'She is detained on business. It is only by chance, more or less, that I saw her at all. She brought someone in, one of her colleagues I suppose it is, to the hospital last night. That's how I saw her.'

The work counter provided Harry with a place he may lean as strength ebbed. Sundry topics zigzagged through his mind. 'And the colleague? I know you can't tell me what happened to him, blasted ethics, but is he alive or dead? You can at least tell us that.'

In the length it took Esias to form the two words, Draco shoved his hands in his greying silver hair, and Harry's knees turned to sinking boats in a stormy sea.

'He's dead.'

The silence shifted, from pity to anxiety to full fright.

'Tempest,' Esias started the sentence with a word that brought care into his voice, 'had a cut on her hand, a gash on her cheek, but we were able to mend those wounds. Her colleague suffered deep internal injuries.'

Draco's eyes glistened in the growing light of day. 'How did he die?'

'If you ask me,' Esias said, 'it looked like he'd fallen off a building, hit something on the way down, and managed to survive. Until we—we couldn't heal him, that is. It's the first loss of an Unspeakable in years.'

'The Ministry is clinging to a fag-end,' Harry announced, never much of an advocate for the way the Ministry of Magic conducted its business affairs. 'If they took anyone at all to St Mungo's, they realise they're participating in something far superior.'

'What?' asked Draco, fierce in glower as the old Draco Harry remembered from school. 'You mean they're taking on something that can warp their arses?'

'Major buggery,' murmured Harry in assent. His thoughts swirled, a miasma perfumed by his thirty-plus years in the wizarding world. To the birth of his daughter, to the pride she had always made him feel. He glanced at Draco, and the soft chamois of a family's inerrant love held them fast.

All at once, he remembered.

'The Window!'

He dashed from the kitchen, down one narrow hall, into the dining room, through the dining room, into the study in the cosy home's front corner. Esias was behind him every step of the way, and Draco drifted in, a wavering leaf not yet ready for the fall. Harry stood before the Window. Tall Esias towered over Harry and had two inches on Draco, but he, too, gaped inurbanely at the object.

Draco's heart sank to impenetrable depths. The shadows had shifted. The world was growing dimmer. He gripped Harry's hand tightly. Harry gripped back, but his features stiffened to a resolve Draco had witnessed once, long ago. Peace had reigned Harry for so many years, peace that Draco had brought, and Tempest, and their lovely home, their bucolic, simple life. Now the peace was perforated, the deckle edge of a galaxy unwrapping a new horror.

Harry evinced willingness to accept this. Yet forlornly, feeling old, as though he had hung up his battle garb and blood-weary sword decades past.

'War is coming.'

*

In the subsequent three weeks, Harry lost his ability to focus on his work. He spent excess amounts of time in London, teeming around the Ministry, searching for clues. More often than not, he wound up in the minister's office. It helped to have such connections at his disposal. And, sometimes, it did not.

London days meant lingering lunches, often at Muggle establishments, with Tempest. And, if he could find the time, Esias would join them. Then came a lunch when Tempest declared it might be worth their while to stick to Diagon Alley. This provided a useful backdrop upon which Harry, long inured in the country, painted gossip into fantastic pictures.

'We're not the only ones who are frightened.' Harry reported his findings and declarations to Draco. 'Something's going on. It doesn't take a Window enchanted by our daughter to figure that out.'

Draco lay on his back, on the bed, arms behind his head. He heard Harry rustle about the boudoir, changing from respectable city wear to grungy about-house clothes. It was early evening, and the mists of October were softly purple, and when the sun hit them they glowed gold and winked. 'It's hard to imagine that, somewhere in the world, evil is unfolding.'

'Agreed.'

Silence roamed between them. A bird called plaintively from a bough quivering outside the window. Draco never felt the same about windows, as soon as the shadows came.

He rolled over, to avoid windows, and to better watch Harry. The passage of years had chalked an outline of the Boy Who lived into the Man Who Did This And That. Harry had never completely settled in life until Draco Malfoy kissed him. And, even afterwards, no career could hold Harry's attention. Draco found his niche in the countryside, as a freelance columnist for a Muggle magazine of natural living and herbs, whose artistic interpretations of an earthly existence had made him quite famous outside wizards and witches. But Harry had taken longer, much longer, to find his path. Even then, it would not be glorious, full of fame and fortune, as so many had thought it would. And it would not be political or tutorial. Harry Potter avoided political friendships, which became unavoidable when his best friend became Minister for Magic; and he avoided all attempts on behalf of Professor McGonagall to teach at Hogwarts. And when McGonagall had passed away years ago, Neville knew Harry too well to ask him to fill the vacancy.

'I'll go with you tomorrow, Harry.'

'You don't have to.'

'I'm not a pacifist.'

'Never said you were.'

'I just don't like confrontation. Does that make me a pacifist?'

Harry smirked. 'I don't think so. Makes you, you. I think.' He leaned over Draco, a pat at his husband's chest, a kiss at a salty temple. 'She'll be thrilled to see you. It's hard for her to leave London now.'

This was often an indigestible topic to Draco. 'I just wish she had a London home, instead of spending all her nights sleeping in a Ministry office. Seems quite dour, to think of our little girl doing just that.'

'Well, as far as I know, she's been spending far more nights recently at Esias's flat.'

Draco's eyes narrowed and he flailed himself upright. 'She is NOT!'

Harry laughed. Draco's shoulders fell.

'Oh how droll, Harry, you absolute bastard,' growled Draco.

'Sorry. Well, not really sorry. You should've seen the expression on your face! Ha!'

Harry was tugged from his feet to the bed, a reprimand tap to his cheek, and a kiss that told him it might be a long while before either of them laughed again.

*

Draco had warned Harry, just as they entered the Ministry, not to give too many dramatic flourishes. And so when Harry became excited just before entering Hermione's office, storming towards her desk and interrupting morning's work, Draco, the wiser for the years, did not try and hold Harry back.

For a second, Hermione saw him coming. 'Wait, Harry, please don't—'

'I want to know what's going on! The world is being crippled by opposing forces, and my daughter's out there fighting against it! Does she know what she's up against? Do any of you? What is it that's out there? I want to know NOW, Hermione!'

'—get excited.' She frowned, deliberately arching it ever downward, before setting aside quill and memos to better express the situation. However, she waited, and in her silence was a command to each of them to sit. Then glances passed, frail and searching. 'How long has it been since you've seen her—Tempest?'

'Three weeks,' Draco answered, speaking far more calmly than Harry. 'We've been in London all this while, hoping to see her.'

Harry had his chin poised on an ever-tightening fist. 'She hasn't been round. Not once.'

'London is hardly the place fit for the end of the world, no matter how highly its inhabitants think of it,' Hermione finally told. 'Tempest is not here, and if she has been at all, it's been between times, a rest or two… I'm not really sure.'

'You're the Minister for Magic, Hermione,' offered Harry, 'if anyone has an idea of what the Unspeakables do… You're the Minister. You know.' But at her blank expression, fitted with sympathy, the wrongness of his words uncoiled. 'You don't know… You've no idea. Do you know what it is she's fighting?'

'All we know is that it's perpetuating itself.'

'What's that mean?'

Shifting forward in the chair, Draco answered his spouse's childish enquiry. 'Evil just creates more evil, as one lie covers another lie. It creates a web of madness and despair. That's what evil is.'

'That's what she's fighting,' surmised Harry.

'We don't really understand it, the origins, the end that may come,' Hermione said demurely. 'We know it's growing. We know that specifically. Tempest was the one who told us so. She feels it. Some of us even believe she's the only one who can see it.'

At this beguiling theory, Hermione could elaborate no further. She wished to end their pain, but, having children of her own, knew that such a task was impossible. Instead, she asked them to come again tomorrow; if the Ministry had heard anything, such delicate information would be passed along then.

With thoughts tipping and turning their world, Harry and Draco wandered Muggle London, better hoping to understand the internal workings of their unusual daughter.

'Some children have a destiny,' Draco explained, bobbing a spoon up and down in coffee, seated at some quiet café they had never took notice of before. Apples and cinnamon sticks were printed on the napkins, and the windows were red and white checks. 'Seems strange to sit in a place so utterly cheerful when the rest of our world is being scorched by something we don't understand. Suppose this is how our parents felt, your parents—and Sirius and Remus—all of them—this is how they felt when their war began?'

'I don't know… This is stranger, more bewildering. They knew, more or less, what they were up against. Evil was tangible then. But this is not. This isn't even visible, if Hermione's theory of Tempest is believable.' The vaguely despondent tone of Hermione's woeful words collected from scattered fragments, and made a unit once more, but altered, as a mosaic, to be seen anew. Harry glanced away, blank outwardly but thoughtful inwardly. The intensity was something Draco recognised, and tried to coax the findings gently from Harry. After running his fingers through his hair, wild and unruly as ever, the glasses removed and left aside, a surprisingly mellow green gaze met Draco's. 'Who else do we know also hypothesised one or two things about our daughter through the years?'

Momentarily confused, Draco's eyebrows went up as the answer came to him.

And so they returned to the wizarding world as soon as they entered St Mungo's.

*

'We've been busier than ever,' Luna said drearily. She was quite exhausted, drooping at the edges of her limp blonde hair with distinguishing white streaks at the temples. Her hands, filled with many years of curing spells and healing herbs, touched Harry's forearm and warmed him there. 'Do wish you'd come and help us out, Harry—and you, Draco. But I understand you haven't the time, of course, with what's been going on.'

'The evil?'

The pronouncement prompted Luna's big eyes to search him, rather imploringly, for better intelligence. 'It's beyond evil, Harry, far, far beyond. It is good, too, in its own way.'

'How can evil be good?' Draco had fixed Luna a cup of tea, the three of them ensconced in a bleakly, sparsely decorated break room. Luna, in her pale teal healing robes striped in whites and pinks, did not particularly fit the archetypal image of old healer; but she was like a tropical dragonfly caught in the wrong atmosphere, yet with the talents and desire to remake the world. She had keen insights others missed, and if anyone were to know… 'Why only this evil, why not all the evil? What makes this one so different?'

She sipped her tea, a habit of sipping, bobbing the bag, turning the cup twice… 'Oh Draco, it's not like at all, you know, really. No evil is like that. Evil has things it must feed on, just as good has. Do you not see the symbiosis in their relationship, the way it works? Like the tea… It is like the tea. Without water, the tea is simply a leaf, and the water is just simply water. But the two together make tea.' She sighed when they failed to comprehend the analogy. 'The evil here exists on its own: it is not created by humankind. The good here exists on its own: it is not created by humankind. But in the places where the two mix together, wherever those places walk—if they are stagnant or transient through time, space, or a forest—that is a new kind of evil that cannot be fought with the same weapons used to fight the old evil.' Luna looked at Harry and cupped her fingers over his wrist. 'You cannot fight it the way you fought your old evils, Harry. None of us can do that now.'

'But why can Tempest see this evil—and the rest of us can't?'

'You can.'

'How?'

'She created the Window to show it to you, those changing shadows you cannot see. She put a piece of herself in the mirror, and through that piece of her you are shown what she has always seen.'

Harry gulped, exasperated, near to tears, at the wonder of it all. He was in awe over Tempest's abilities, and yet… Yet… He barely dared himself to ask the next question. 'What sort of connection does Tempest have to this evil? That's what I don't understand. Why her? Is she—evil?'

A sympathetic Luna, eager to control Harry's worries in the only way she knew how, by emotive concern and a curative squeeze of her fingers, merely shook her head. It was after a moment that her own empathy caused tears to rise. 'She is not evil. She's part of the good that's fighting the evil—and prepared to do what it takes to destroy it. But they co-exists, don't they? Those two… She can see it, and it can see her.'

*

The session with Luna left Harry and Draco lethargic and uncertain. They returned to the café, the one with apples and cinnamon sticks printed on napkins, and over sweet pastries they couldn't taste, and drinks they didn't touch, they paraphrased Luna's cunning observations. From there, rough as the ground their thoughts tread upon, the two of them visited Hermione. They stalked her into the Ministry building the next morning, demanding to know Tempest's location.

'Why, Harry?' Hermione, uncomfortable with the scenarios this conversation sketched in her mind, scolded him with a glare if not words. Her words, contrary to her outer coldness, were stifled fears. 'If Luna is right, neither you nor Draco have a chance of helping her.'

'If you believe in Luna's theory, Hermione, then at least tell us where Tempest is.'

'So you can run off and be hero? No. Draco, talk sense into him.'

'Afraid I think he's right, after a fashion.' Draco met her scowl with affability and strength. 'Look, Hermione, being who we are, being what our daughter is, and what she's doing, we cannot promise we won't brandish wands and go charging into the fray. We will if she needs us.'

Hermione turned to him, soft, reasonable, and remorseful. 'I would tell you where she is—if I knew.'


	4. The Glass World

4. The Glass World

In the middle of the night, their room at the Leaky Cauldron was infiltrated by a calm, purposeful, tall silhouette. The end of his wand lit at the simultaneous moment Harry's and Draco's wands ignited.

'Esias?' Harry thought the figure might be Esias, but the tricky illumination, the sleepy blear…

'Do you want to know where Tempest is? Then come with me.'

He was adamant, confident, and they saw no reason to distrust him. Tempest trusted him; Esias had been her only true friend throughout school. She did not take two steps ahead without having Esias as a welcome image echoed at her heels. She was the beacon, and he was the lay of light.

By this time, the end of summer had come, and with it the unusual traces of fog lowering across the city. Diagon Alley was a dark place, smeared in ghostly grey clouds, moving and changing, against the still air. Esias wound them down the familiar street, the shops slumbering on either side. They passed the wand shop where Tempest had brought out a storm and a rainbow as she first held her wand, the wand that had no core, that was nothing more than elegantly carved and polished bit of wood… It seemed far more likely, in the years gone by, Tempest had outgrown her need for the wand as a conductor of magic. It was all inside of her, at the core of her.

At an abandoned building, one that had closed during the war and never reopened, Esias walked through an illusion of mouldering boards covering a shattered window. While that might be a mirage, the interior was indeed dank and lifeless, the odour of oldness and staleness, and endless in their horrified senses.

Esias, too used to witnessing fright, acknowledged that of Draco and Harry. With a flick and swish of his wand, and a determined mutter of '_Arevelum!_', a moth-eaten drape of soiled gold dropped from its place beside an unused stone fireplace. In the dim cast of streetlights streaming coldly through chunks of absent exterior, the object behind the veil gathered depth and shape.

Harry wandered forward, astonished, mesmerised, horrified. He gulped and tried to reach for it, only to draw his hand back in alarm. It was the same magic from the other, its twin, and he felt the same shiver cascade across his heart. 'There are two of them… Two windows.'

Confirming this, Esias stepped to Harry's side, and Draco was there, wand at the ready should he be in need of it. He peered deeply into the empty space before them, catching a metallic gleam within—there one moment, in another place, a flickering light.

'Two of them,' he repeated, confounded, searching, in his own capable mind, for a reason why. 'One for entrance, one for an exit? No… No, that can't be it.' Once more, Draco tilted his head, to give the dead thing in front of him more life, this window into nowhere. In suddenness, he knew what to do, and answered the plaintive call. He inched forward, hand extended, fingertips near the glass.

'Draco,' warned Harry, 'don't…' He tried to warn Draco not to touch it, but it faded, and it came too late. Harry's breath drew in sharply the moment Draco set his hand against the pane. Nothing changed.

The glass was cool beneath, but did not warm with the heat of his body. Draco receded, further perplexed. 'Maybe it's not in me.'

'What? Insanity? You have that in abundance. I don't think we're supposed to touch it. Esias?'

'Mr Potter?'

'What did she tell you to do with this window?' The moment Esias' eye reached him, the weight of insoluble grief weighed Harry at the shoulders, the stomach, the heart.

'She said to show the two of you, and you would know what to do. It is not just her war. It is the war of us all.'

'I don't understand…' Harry chewed his lips and reached for his wand. 'I don't understand what the war is, but I understand the concept of good taking on evil, and evil believing itself impervious.' He and Draco shared a distended observation, careworn with the harsh memories of forgotten battles, on a battlefield familiar. As the parade of decades wound by, Harry reached forward and gingerly set his hand to the glass. He felt the magic rise in him before he saw it alter the glass. It turned smoky, and out of the froth rose shapes, and from the colourless blocks a landscape formed. Harry peeled his hand back, the magic spell complete. His steps retreated until meeting a soft embrace at his elbow.

Immediately, Draco divined the familiarity, and placed it in fragile words. 'That's… home. It's showing us home.'

'It's showing us the same image we see from the window Tempest built for us.' Emboldened, enraged by the noose of grief, and winning, somehow, against the confusion so close to suffocating him, Harry finally lowered his wand. Sadness, a cold, empty emotion, rose in his eyes. Time had provided him with the answer, and, once free of ignorance, he was at the mercy of spite and putridity.

'The window doesn't show us the darkness as it comes into existence,' he postulated aloud, convinced of his accuracy. 'It holds the darkness, like a guardian,' Harry's intrepid gaze fell once more upon the view of Lake Country, enshrouded now in the veils of the enemy, 'like a glass world trapped in a glass jar.'

The concept amazed Draco, staring into the motionless shapes and blinking away befuddlement. To think that his daughter, the one he had raised, had nurtured and cared for, in spite of all the obstacles in his own life, his own emotional detriments, _his daughter_, rent from the flesh and bone of him, had accomplished this.

A tremendous feat of magic. Something wonderful. Something impossible.

It was inexpressible, their intrigue, their urgent need to know how she had done it. And so Esias spoke, solemnity crossing his lips, laced with the aroma of deference and love.

'She knew, after some time, what the world would be up against. And when she knew, she formed this first, the window—the material portion of her theoretical hex. The first window was completed, and she gave it to you, her parents, to watch over it. Then the shadows moved, slowly at first, diffident and uncertain of their strength. They soon grew brave, wishing to expand outside the boundaries set for themselves, and their awareness increased their alacrity. She could not always get home, to your home, the only place she's ever known as such, when she needed to. Knowing she could not ask for the Window to be moved, she planned around such an obstacle. That is when she built this, the second window, and brought it here. She stood before it, where we stand now, and staring into it she spoke the hex—the words I can't repeat; they were all sibilants of sorrow. The hex reached the evil and bound it. There are two windows, but they are the same window, the same spirit, the same object, but existing in two places simultaneously. If you want to find Tempest, she is in there.' Esias indicated the still and silent world held in place behind thin panes. 'She called it the Glass World. Capable of being broken, fragile, fictile, and she has the breath of redemption.'

Absurdity never came to mind: Harry claimed the idea, clung to it, as he once again set his palm to the glass, his daughter's realm beyond his reach. Tempest, too, beyond his reach. He swung around to Esias. 'How do we get through? Is there some sort of spell?'

'Are we supposed to utter the hex she used to bind the evil?' Draco wondered if they were supposed to know, that she was their daughter and they were supposed to know. It was possible she had told them, in a clandestine sentence back at shroud's beginning, and in the panic of the time Draco could not remember. He pictured her face, her teal and silver eyes, her tumbles of obsidian locks, the smallness of her, the comfort of her, and the kindness not overshadowed by her natural talent. 'Are we supposed to use the hex that carried her into the Glass World? If there is such a thing…'

Esias, since meeting them during his Hogwarts years, had always held to an inexplicable calmness others did not possess to his magnitude. For all the strangeness of the night, Esias favoured simplicity, and his precision was not marred by a burdening fear. The urgency was in the timbre of his low voice, the stormy rumble in it.

'The two of you will be invited,' Esias dropped his head a degree, emoting complacency, the only argument with Tempest ever had, 'you will be invited when she asks it of her world. The window will bring you. That is its duty. She created the world to hold the evil, and the magic to know the world, to access it, and to bring you into it when the time came. That is where she is. You will not have to wait long. I have sensed that from her.'

The statement dragged from the depths of Draco all the jibes and jokes Harry and he had made about their daughter's relationship with such a sturdy young man. 'Won't you be going, Esias?'

'I am her confidante,' said Esias, 'but I am not her hero. She is her own hero. And mine. And yours.'

Bolstered by the maudlin decree, Draco, already uncomfortable under newly gained knowledge, folded his arms and, showing a wistful youthfulness, sneered Esias' direction. 'Does Tempest know you love her so much?' He was not surprised that Harry's hand flew at him in one silencing slap across the forearm. 'Well, it's true…'

Harry, full of hope, looked to Esias, clarification soon to follow. He could not find out if it were true by asking. A query would be rude. But to wait, to somehow goad the answer using silence… Harry never realised how important it was to believe that Tempest had had a chance to be loved. It hadn't been considered by Harry or Draco, only the antagonistic way they spoke of her when they were alone, when she was far from earshot. She had school, fame through school, then the subsequent enshrouding of fame through a career no one could follow, and then she had a world to control…

'Tempest knew her destiny,' started Esias, the subject now a smooth one, once self-imposed reconciliation had passed, the night Tempest said no… 'And those with a destiny are not often inclined to see love, or capable of embracing it with a clear conscience. Her heart might have bent towards me, moments here and there—we cherished them, what they were—but the duty of her spirit, the extensive amount of magic in her, took her beyond the place where the love of one person mattered above the love of all things.'

Esias elevated a hand when he sensed Harry's readied protest. The evaluation was not necessary. It had already been done. Esias was at peace, but he would miss Tempest if she could not leave the Glass World.

'She will call for you,' repeated Esias, tucking his wand into the sleeve of navy robes, 'and through her love for you, the assurance and steadfastness of it, you will go to her. You will have no choice.'

Weary, exhausted, and broken-hearted, Draco and Harry waited before the Window. And when she did call for them, they were not expecting it. Harry heard a voice behind him, a ghost in echo from corner to corner, and jumped around to catch the apparition. He felt hot. He felt cold. He felt Draco jump beside him. They heard the feminine echo again, rising up with a musty wind as though from the base of a tomb, and it swirled around and about to the intensity of a tempestuous squall. But it was not lightning that flickered behind the Window's panes. It was a parting of heavy, droopy clouds, and a patch of golden sky, fringed in sunset hues. It was a rainbow falling from the break in the storm, through the panes, and scattered in the wavy glass to colour the floor at their feet.

*

The warm light faded, and left them shivering in a cold place, a landscape filled end to end with winter. They were not expecting winter, its isolation, its emptiness. The stillness went on as they conjured cloaks against the air, as they looked around and tried to find the compass of this strange place.

'We should not have named her Tempest,' Draco said, tall beneath the low, sagging boughs of an evergreen, as he looked into the horizon, respecting the infinity that met his sight. 'We should have named her Alice.'

'Or Carroll,' uttered Harry, tromping through eight inches of stiff snow to meet Draco. 'But our daughter who controls the wind of this realm, and bends light to her will, she is the tempest of a universe, of a world she created, and we could not have named her more aptly. This might have looked like our home from the other side of the glass, but if you look again, it is not our home at all. This is her home.'

'Far more snow than Lake Country, anyhow, particularly for early October.'

'There's that, too.'

'It is a beautiful world, though everything seems to refract slightly from itself.' Draco had a way of expressing the glitches in the mirage that Harry hadn't been able to verbalise, yet he was keenly aware of it. The Glass World seemed as fragile as its namesake.

Harry, stunned still, surveyed the circumference, and saw little in the way of direction. 'From here, where do you suppose we go?'

'Well, Potter,' Draco grabbed the front of his spouse's cloak and dragged him along, 'I suggest we search our inner selves—follow our instincts—or, if we happen to come to a tea party or a grinning cat, ask for directions to our daughter. In this place, she might be referred to as the Goddess.'

'You're being very aloof about this. She might be injured or hurt or—perhaps she is sitting on a gilded throne somewhere, sipping dandelion wine and making her way through a lifetime's supply of vanilla lokum.' Harry was relieved, though still chilly, when Draco chortled.

They walked in a compass direction unknown, and for some time the only companionable noise was the thrum of snow crunching beneath their shoes. The hills became steeper, indicating a rise into mountains, and when they believed the next ascent would lead them to mountains witnessed in the distance, it only brought them to a low descent. A valley opened wide, swallowed in snow, with the gentle grades of hills rising and falling. Daylight began to shift. They noticed it by the deepening shadows on the far side of hills and snowy dunes, against short clumps of sparse vegetation. There were no trees, no calling birds, no whisper of wind catching in their ears. Harry had taken over the lead, the two of them setting a slow pace, far too easy when they had no destination. They had the misery of being lost, and the fright that Tempest would not know they had come for her. Harry drew his eyes across the land to witness the last lay of light, and thought it all rather misleading, the time of that place. They could not have been there so many hours, nor walking for so long.

He drew in a breath of surprise, bringing Draco to attention. Ahead of them, on the side of an inconspicuous knoll, a thousand thin strands of shadows pooled into a fat ribbon. They saw that it was a path just wide enough for two persons walking abreast—an obsidian road cut from a metallic sheet of silver frost. The road went on past the point where they could see, and at the horizon of its make-believe end, a full moon lifted. And when its glowing imprint might have been blue, it left instead hues of pink, rose, and shadows magenta. Without a word between them, Draco and Harry followed the path, a silent walk of no crunching snow, no careworn postulations revisited, as all sorrow seemed depleted.

Either several hours had passed, or, to their feeling a mere handful of minutes, before the road led them into high mountains, to a stream of crystal liquid frozen at its shores, and sentinel conifers, taller and far superior than those they had yet seen, stood over it, watching carefully. The strange moon shrugged from fleeting tails of vapour, and shined upon the white walls of a building nestled among the conifers, adjacent the river. They were haunted by a feeling that the tower, derelict and precariously tilted, held their daughter. Reaching it was arduous, and they were out of breath from exertion, and excited by fear. It had taken them hours, from afternoon to the rise of the moon, to find her, yet she had called for them, and now, entering the tower, scrambling over patches of snow and ice, no one but vacancy and its hush waited. Staring at one another, appalled to have expectations shaken, Draco suggested they split up, an idea Harry couldn't argue. Draco found a winding staircase to rise high into the tower's pinnacle, and Harry wound around inside once more, checking concealed corners, the blackest areas where she might hide. All the while, they called her name, each other's voices the only response. Harry, taking his frantic search outside, endured flashbacks to his own battles, the fall of the tower, the loss of Dumbledore, the infinite night that oftentimes plagued nightmares and bitterly repainted dreamscapes… What had Tempest endured here, in the uncertain serenity of her fragile Glass World? He tried to make sense of the knowledge he'd gleaned, about her, about this place, about the evil and the good. He rounded the front of the tower, having gone about the back, searching and finding nothing, no trace of her—no sign of footprints marring the snow. He heard Draco's voice, stern, believable, real, as he threw it into the illusory place. But Harry dragged his feet, stopping altogether, as a frangible whiteness, paler than the suddenly greyish magenta snow and light surrounding, ensnared his gaze, and sent his heart into a rapid fall. Limp, exhausted, on his knees, Harry whispered her name before hollering another. Draco, poised at crenellations above, let his gaze revisit what he had missed before.

'She blended in,' he said, digging heels into the snow, taking her when Harry couldn't. 'I couldn't see her, she blended in… Tempest?' Draco touched her cheek, holding her there, waiting for a sign of life in the twitch of black lashes, the subtle movement in face or hands. Harry said she was alive, warm and alive, breathing shallowly, but beating strongly in heart. Draco attended her invisible wounds with emotions unbarred. 'What do we do, Harry? If she doesn't know what she's doing, if this is somehow become too much for her… What do we do?'

'We always said she had a sense of destiny,' murmured Harry, setting a hand across Tempest's forehead.

'But we didn't think it would kill her.'

He ignored the remark, it was too hurtful to consider, and turned again towards Tempest. 'You need to wake up. This is what you're here for. You brought us here for this, to wake you and guide you and lead you. Wake up, Tempest, and tell us how to finish this for you. If it's part of your destiny, then it's part of ours, too.' He had no notion that such a harangue would reach her. But he must have had enough good in him, or a smattering of resentment, the evil anger that so thrived in her world, bred out of the love he had for her. The tips of Harry's fingers flexed inward, and Draco pulled her closer in a paroxysm of relief and adoration, as her eyes, limpid and stalwart, opened to perceive the endless angle of the sky. In this action, the moonlight brightened, and its reddish hue altered from rose to cyan—and yet all the shadows grew, with trees by the pond broadening, and the crescent shapes from the fells turned opaque as though razed and burnt.

'It's not over,' murmured Tempest. She clung to their sensitive regards. 'You came for me… And it's not over.'

'We came for you because you asked us to be here,' Draco said. His effort of gentleness collapsed as she lifted from him, to stand well on feet of her own, possessing the merit and will to do so. 'What's this place, this world, and what is the evil?'

But Tempest failed to heed, for her eyes widened frightfully upon the moon, and she stumbled back two steps. She pivoted, diving her hands in the cold fluff, and made mad mumbles about finding her wand. Draco tried to help, searching the same way, again asking questions she was too disinclined to answer. Harry reached for her, arm looping her waist, successfully drawing her from the task.

'You don't need a wand,' he told her. 'You never did. All the power that magic could ever have is in you: you are the only conductor your spells will ever need. Not very many have that power, not to use it all the time, not without a separate intent infused within the spell. But you have that power, Tempest. The wand is a false tool. You know it is. Now tell us what we're fighting. Why have you brought us here, to your world? This magnificent, horrible world, where everything's transparent and nothing's real, and maybe the only things that are real are us, the moon, and the shadows. Where's the start of the evil, and how is this going to end?'

He had her in his hold by then, hands at her shoulders and squeezing. She wore white and silver and pale teal. She looked like her irises, wild and swelling in the general nonconformity of her spirit. Harry saw her glance at the trees, to the lay of their silhouettes, and thought he knew the answer.

'It's the shadows. Of course… They move freely. They're intelligent. They create.'

Draco, imbued now with this information, drew out his wand, armed and prepared to turn his rage against a discovered enemy. Harry nodded at him, joined by purpose. He shifted to tackle the obstacle, to observe before attacking—but found his way impeded by a clasp upon his forearm.

'Evil is not the shadows,' Tempest said, place again at the apex of wisdom and serenity. In her calmness, she was able to let the truth come, and let go of groping lies. 'The shadows are hiding from the light. In this place, they have to, afraid the light will see what they're going to do. I didn't expect you to know—I didn't expect anyone would know, ever, but me—what this darkness was, what I had created, the shadow and light within me. But it's all the goodness in the world, and all it's badness, too. I'm the anomaly of magic, its gift and its curse, and that is why the evil exists,' Tempest paused to gaze upon the solemn, voiceless moon, 'and why the good exists.' She soon witnessed her parents' disbelief, and guiding their elbows took them to tower's lea, where shadows, alive and winking somehow across the snow, concealed them from the villainous leer of the moon. There was but a sparse moment when it could be said, and so she gripped their hands as vices, and held on. 'I created the evil by being too good—too powerful—too in touch with the magic. When I realised what had happened, I built the window. I built the window and the world behind it—the Glass World—to keep it from releasing itself. But it does… It does, in little ways it does. The glass is not unbreakable, and I still exist outside the glass, when I am not behind it. When I'm out there, the residue of this place runs from me and into the open, and leaves a trace of itself behind. I came here to stay—to stay here always—but the light is too strong. The glass is breaking too fast. You have to dim the light. And when the light is dimmed, the glass will be safe, the world will be safe—my world and,' Tempest looked at them, blinking though not crying, adamant and complacent, 'and your world.'

'We're not helping just to see you locked in here forever.'

She didn't seem to hear Harry.

'Tempest…' Even the melancholic drone of her name in Draco's voice failed to gather her focus.

'I'll take to the shadows,' she said, aware of nothing else but the plan. 'And you take to the light. Aim—and be unkind. It is the only way.' Tempest shrugged away their reaching fingers, along with their desire and will, and betook herself from them at a run. The snowy hillside collected her footprints. The trees welcomed their mendicant of mercy.

'She can't stay—' Draco's sentence was interrupted by Harry's hand crashing against his mouth.

'We do it. We do it without asking what will happen.'

'But…'

'We do it because I can feel it, too. It's a sickness in the air, poisonous and mephitic, stale and ancient, like a magic spell cast long ago and lingering. You would feel it, if you had ever seen it the way I had. Maybe tomorrow, when this is over,' Harry held Draco briefly before parting, 'you'll be able to see it then. Now think about it. Think about hate and mercilessness. Think about what it does to Tempest, think about the rage consuming me right now. And when you're ready, spell the moon.'

'With what? Rage and fury?'

'With everything.'

Harry was too soon ready, for he immediately whipped around and tossed his wand towards the bright and beautiful moon. His energy culled all anger and illness from his source, pouring it into a single stream of black and blue and pearl. It seemed to go only so far before evanescing, and only through the ticking by of seconds, when the light of the powerful satellite began to dim, did Harry know for certain his strength mimicked intent. Then Draco followed, caustic but magnificent, malignant and dominant. There came a feral wind, warm and sweet, from the aiding shadows. It mixed with the magic of the Glass World, of its earth, air, and sky. A song played faintly, the harmony of the elements, and all faded: light, shadows, song, elements—and a veil dropped across the galaxy.

Harry and Draco turned to where they had seen Tempest. The shadows were growing, slinking across the snow where light had been. But they saw her momentarily, her pale, beautiful face soon engulfed by the everlasting night, before they, too, were taken by it—and swept from her world on the broken pieces of a shattered moon.


	5. The Legend

5. The Legend

A week of mundanity followed, of meetings with Hermione and various departmental leaders, of avoiding questions but carefully choosing answers. It was only when alone with Hermione, but in the company of Esias Pugh, whom, Draco and Harry believed, had a right to know the full extent of the truth, that they revealed what had happened, moment to moment, when they stepped through the glass into their daughter's world. To her credit, Hermione believed them, able to, after much study in sparse personal time, to compose theories on the matter, sharing them, at first, with no one but Tempest's parents and Esias.

But when others began to ask what had become of her, when the months went by, then a year went by, Harry and Draco informed Hermione that she could publish her essays on Tempest's Window. It explained, to the wizarding world, what one young woman had accomplished. She continued to be the legendary Tempest Potter first formed at Hogwarts, for spells of such imagination and awe and talent that all professors had, at some point, been too curious to prepare discipline. Her legend grew through her career as an Unspeakable, undeniable now that the Minister for Magic had admitted Tempest Potter to be so, the only one ever named among the unmentionable ranks.

She became a myth as curses and spells, both beautiful and hideous, were named for her. No portrait of her ever hung anywhere, and no picture of her had ever been taken. She remained uniquely anonymous in looks, but for the descriptions Esias Pugh wrote of her in his journals, so that the real Tempest Potter, if he had ever really known her, if he had only caught glimpses of her, would not be forgotten.

He was with Draco and Harry on the last visit to the old abandoned building in Diagon Alley. The twin Window had vanished long ago, nothing of it remaining but a memory ever waning. He was with them, too, on a summer's day ten years after the battle. The day when the Window began to speak back.

'She'll call for you someday,' Harry told Esias, the two of them fixed on the prospect shaped by the Window. 'The way she called for Draco and me that night—she'll call for you.'

Esias did not really believe this to be true, and yet his hope singed his pessimism. He watched the tall grasses of the craggy landscape tip and sway at the slightest intent of wind. She could be lying in that grass, somewhere, hidden in its russet tops, its soft yellow-green blades, her black hair captured and whipped by the breeze.

It was surprising, not alarming, that he opened his eyes and found himself there, in just the very instant he wished for her the most. He was as he'd been in his imagination: lying upon the ground, the sun warm upon him, the grasses in their frolicking sarabande—and her small being, of light and loveliness, next to him. She touched his smile with her fingers, letting the tips trail across the wrinkles below his eyes, between his brows, the laugh lines beside his lips.

'Esias… you've grown old.'

He found a white strand upon her hair, above her ear, and caressed it. 'So did you.'

'I don't know how—and I don't know how long it has been.'

'Fourteen years.'

'Is that all? I expected lifetimes… I expected to live lifetimes…'

'You did. A lifetime in twenty years. It was all the time you ever needed. Have I come to bring you home?' But he knew it was no providence of his. She had commanded him another way. 'I am to stay, then.'

'Stay…' she repeated, losing her breath in the raucous wind. A slender leg slung around him, her knees squeezing his hips, and her hair falling, curled ribbons of black against a bright sky of deep azure, against the lids of his eyes. Tempest left a blanket of kisses from forehead to chin, from neck to jaw, and back again. 'Stay, stay, stay…'

He laughed, saying he would, that he had always wanted to. 'You don't have to be a hero here, in this world of yours?'

'My world is my own. I am its everything. But now you've come, you're its everything, too. My everything and my all—and you. We don't have to be heroes any more.'

*

Harry returned to the sitting room, sun tipping in afternoon apathy across golden floorboards and rust-coloured rugs, to find the place empty. Last he looked, Esias had stood before the Window, a wish in his gaze. In the Window, from the deep wheat-red of the grass, Harry saw them—Tempest and Esias—wading through, their steps in time, their hands entwined.

'Draco!' Harry wailed, flinging his voice as far as it would go. 'Draco! She's all right! She's there!'

Draco dashed in, clipping his toe on a sofa foot, an end table that went crashing. He stumbled and had Harry catch him, straighten him, and turn him again to the Window. He saw her, too, the figure unmistakably Tempest. He touched the pane, trying to touch her, but feeling only the smoothness of glass.

'When will she step out of that world and return to ours?'

Harry squeezed his hand, remembering Tempest's road of destiny, the beginning of it, and now this change to an ending he thought he knew. 'She will… It is her Window, her Glass World, and her choice. One day, she will come back, the one day she's meant to.'

*

_The end._


End file.
